On July 18, 2019, Chinese and Ecuadorian government officials and shareholder leaders pressed the start button on the Mirador Copper Mine in Ecuador. It will operate for another 27 years at least, and is located in Tundayme in Zamora-Chinchipe Province, in the southeastern part of the Republic of Ecuador. The mine is held by Quito-based company EcuaCorriente SA (ECSA) which is part of a consortium called CRCC-Tongguan between two Chinese companies: Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Holdings and China Railway Construction Corporation Ltd (CRRC) which also control the operating company China Railway Construction Copper Crown Investment Co Ltd.
The construction of the first phase of the project is aimed at the Mirador copper mine, which has been completed and put into production. The designed mining and processing production scale is 20 Mt of ore processed per year, with 60,000 t daily. The annual output of copper concentrate will be 354,000 t and the amount of copper metal 96,000 t. The second phase of the expansion will develop the north orebody and eventually see a production scale of 120,000 t of ore per day. Ramp up has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic including operation suspension between March 20 and August 26, 2020, but is now back on track.
Up until now, the mine has been using a large fleet of Sinotruk 70 t tipper trucks, similar to what is used in many Chinese mines but Chinese mining equipment major XCMG has recently shipped a fleet of equipment worth over $40 million to South America including a number of machines for Mirador, which includes a variety of models but among these its first large scale mining equipment including a 400 t XE4000 hydraulic mining shovel and a 260 ton class electric drive rigid truck – an XDE260. The rest of the operation has also mainly used Chinese supplied equipment including from CITIC Heavy Industries in Luoyang which supplied two sets of 10.97 m × 5.4 m SAG mills and 7.9 m × 13.6 m ball mills; and Taiyuan Heavy Industry (TYHI) which supplied crushing stations and other large building fabrications. China’s BGRIMM supplied the flotation plant for the project – 16 sets of KYF-320 and 18 sets of KYF-70 flotation cells.
The estimated resources of the Mirador copper mine are 860 Mt, the Cu geological grade is 0.525%, and the Cu metal content is 4.516 Mt. The total amount of ore and rock within the designed boundary is 1.4 billion tons, of which there are 585 Mt of ore (cut-off grade Cu ≥0.3%), and 817 Mt of waste rock. The Mirador North mine has an estimated resource amount of 596 Mt, the Cu geological grade is 0.44%, and the Cu metal content is 2.624 Mt.
The mine has created more than 2,400 direct and over 10,000 indirect jobs for the local area. ECSA also invests about $200,000 each year in skills training for Ecuadorian employees to improve the knowledge reserve and business level of the employee team. ECSA states: “As the first large-scale mine in Ecuador, the company is committed to building a benchmark enterprise for environmentally friendly and community-responsible mining. The cultural and technological exchanges and integration between employees of the two countries jointly promote the development of the mining industry are a model of friendly cooperation between the two countries. The transfer of knowledge and the collision of culture have promoted the development of different fields and industries in the area affected by the Mirador copper mine, thereby increasing the income of local families and promoting the economic development of Ecuador. The Mirador copper mine is a milestone in the mining industry in Ecuador. It is the implementation of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative in South America, which has brought strong impetus to the sustainable development of Ecuador’s economy, and has produced fruitful results and will continue.”